Twitter's working on an edit button, but it won't be what you think

Twitter is a confounding place for many reasons, but perhaps its oddest quirk is that since its founding in 2006, it hasn't had an edit button.

That may change, and soon. CEO Jack Dorsey reportedly told an audience in India that the company is considering adding the edit functionality to tweets, primarily to fix typos.

"We have been considering this for a while and we have to do [it] in the right way. We can't just rush it out. We can't make something which is distracting or takes anything away from the public record," he said, according to a report in The Next Web on Monday. He added that Twitter will not let people edit willy nilly, for fear that people might abuse the feature to alter controversial or damning statements after the fact.

Twitter's omission of an edit button has always been an odd choice, considering its central place in much of internet culture.

Many of its 326 million users have approached the problem with an awkward solution: Delete a tweet they'd want to edit and send a new one. Though that process works, it removes all responses to the original tweet. And in the case of public figures, like President Donald Trump, deleting an even errant tweet might violate the records-keeping rules.

"It is actually incentivizing you to increase that number. That may have been right 12 years ago, but I don't think it is right today," he said. "I think what is more important is the number of meaningful conversations you're having on the platform. How many times do you receive a reply?"